F. A. Hayek on Socialist Trends

In 1944, Hayek wrote

The supreme tragedy is still not seen that in Germany it was largely people of good will, men who were admired and held up as models in the democratic countries, who prepared the way for, if they did not actually create, the forces which now stand for everything they detest. Yet our chance of averting a similar fate [as Nazi Germany] depends on our facing the danger and on our being prepared to revise even our most cherished hopes and ambitions if they should prove to be the source of danger. There are few signs yet that we have the intellectual courage to admit to ourselves that we may have been wrong. Few are ready to recognize that the rise of fascism and naziism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those tendencies. This is a truth which most people were unwilling to see even when the similarities of many of the repellent features of the internal regimes in communist Russia and National Socialist Germany were widely recognized. As a result, many who think themselves infinitely superior to the aberrations of naziism, and sincerely hate all its manifestations, work at the same time for ideals whose realization would lead straight to the abhorred tyranny.

The Road to Serfdom. ed. Bruce Caldwell. Routledge, London: The University of Chicago Press. 2007, p. 59.